Next: Introduction
The binding roots of symbolic AI:
a brief review of the Cyc project
Deniz Yuret
MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
545 Technology Square, Room 815
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
e-mail: deniz@mit.edu
Tue Apr 1 21:26:14 EST 1997
Abstract:
Cyc is a monumental but controversial research effort for codifying
the human consensus knowledge initiated by Doug Lenat in 1984. The human
consensus knowledge is meant to be the background knowledge that a human is
assumed to possess in order to understand, for example, newspaper articles or
encyclopedia entries. The methodology chosen is to enter this knowledge
explicitly in a large knowledge base. A team of knowledge enterers have been
actively engaged in this process since the onset of the project. It is a
multi-million dollar, decade-long, two person-century effort. The engineering
goal of Cyc is to overcome the brittleness of conventional application programs
by letting them fall back on background knowledge. The scientific goal of Cyc
is to build a system that would exhibit human level common sense and
understanding. I believe that Cyc has a respectable goal but inadequate
methodology. I further believe that this inadequacy comes from insisting on
three limiting principles: (1) representing knowledge explicitly, (2)
representing knowledge in a single uniform framework, and (3) insisting on
deduction as the main inference engine.
Deniz Yuret
Tue Apr 1 21:26:01 EST 1997